I Yell at My Kids — And I'm OK With That

"This is the fifth time I asked you to stop throwing the ball in the house! Take it to the basement, take it outside, but not in here!"

I yelled these words — bellowed them, in fact — to my three young sons just the other day. In the moment, I was completely exasperated. I had a pot of boiling water on the stove and a class to teach in 30 minutes. Our family had two soccer practices to attend, three pages of second and fourth grade math homework to complete, and, somehow, a whole dinner to eat, all within the four remaining hours in the day.

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I had no time for a broken light bulb or window or vase or, frankly, anything. Nor could I pause the ticking seconds — or the boiling water — and speak calmly to my children about how we could resolve the problem: namely, that they weren't listening to me, and their actions could have dire consequences, and they would need to pay to replace anything they broke, and ARRRGHHH WHY WEREN'T THEY JUST LISTENING AND FOLLOWING THE RULES OF OUR HOUSEHOLD?!

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Yelling seemed like the right thing to do in the situation. Honestly, it felt like the only thing I could do to get their attention.

Many childhood experts would disagree, however. Some research shows that harsh verbal discipline may be detrimental to adolescents' long-term well-being — just as detrimental as physical discipline, in fact.

Even as someone who sometimes resorts to yelling, I can appreciate these findings. Yelling is not an effective disciplinary tool. It's often more of a way for a parent to express their own frustration and impatience than it is for a way to guide the behavior of their children.

Yelling doesn't show any of us in our best light.

Yet there is a vast difference between yelling, "This is the fifth time I asked you to stop throwing that ball in the house!" and shouting, "Are you stupid or something? Don't throw the [insert expletive] ball in the house!"

One is a matter of grabbing a child's attention. Another is a matter of humiliating and belittling them.

Thus, parents who yell need not be cruel parents: they might simply be exasperated ones. And the moments of overflowing exasperation are the ones where I most often find myself yelling at my children.

To be clear, many of us can work on reducing our yelling. I, for one, probably didn't need to yell at my kids recently about leaving a damp towel on the antique wooden table. They care not about preserving good furniture, and my yelling isn't going to make them start caring.

But I don't think that yelling in and of itself should leave any parent wracked with guilt and anxiety. Sometimes it's okay to allow our kids to see the full extent of our frustration. Sometimes it's okay to let them see us as the flawed and imperfect people that we are.

Perhaps the questions we should ask ourselves are: How often do we yell? Do we yell at the first sign of a mistake or transgression? What is the content of our shouting? What are we saying? Are we expressing our own frustration, or are we trying to use yelling as a substitute for positive discipline? And maybe most importantly, do we say "I'm sorry" when we've yelled too loudly, too often, or too indiscriminately?

I did apologize to my children for yelling at them about the wet towel on the wood furniture. I said, "I'm sorry." I explicitly stated that it wasn't okay for me to yell. Because in that particular instance, it wasn't.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that sometimes, yelling seems like the most okay thing a parent can do.